Genes, Peoples, and Languages

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question -- anticipated by Darwin -- with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages is a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goat of which has been nothing less than tracking the past 100,000 years of human evolution.

Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection between genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification and proposes that a comparison of blood types is a far better means of determining "genetic distance" and explaining linguistic and cultural differences.

A panoramic tour of the major discoveries in genetic anthropology, Genes, Peoples, and Languages gives us a rare firsthand account of some of the most significant scientific work of recent years. Enthralling, profound, and lively, this is popular science writing at its best.

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LibraryThing Review

Nutzerbericht - setnahkt - LibraryThing

It’s not clear who comprises the intended audience for this book. It seems to have been intended as a more popular version of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s magnum opus, the encyclopedic, fascinating ...Vollständige Rezension lesen

LibraryThing Review

Nutzerbericht - Jewsbury - LibraryThing

This book is an easy-to-read well-craft tale written by an authoritative geneticist. The author shows how we can discover details of our shared pre-history – the time before writing. It is certainly ...Vollständige Rezension lesen

Über den Autor (2000)

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was born in Genoa, Italy on January 25, 1922. He received a medical degree from the University of Pavia in 1944. He worked as a physician in Italy for two years before deciding to focus on microbiology and then genetics. He became an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge in Britain in 1948. From 1951 to 1970, he taught at the University of Parma as well as at the University of Pavia, where he led the genetics department. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1970 to 1992 and continued to do research for more than a decade after retiring. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza was a pioneer in using genetic information to help trace human evolution, history, and patterns of migration. He was the founder of genetic geography and the co-founder of cultural evolution with Marcus Feldman. He worked on the Human Genome Diversity Project. He was the author or co-author of hundreds of scientific articles and nine books including The History and Geography of Human Genes. He died on August 31, 2018 at the age of 96.